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Dungeon Raid: Not getting anything accomplished IRL ever again. (iOS)

joshofalltradesYOU get a hellbat! YOU get a hellbat!Everybody gets a hellbat!Registered Userregular

See this icon right here? You are this icon's bitch. This icon owns your soul.

Review from TouchArcade:

The match three section is arguably the most overstuffed virtual aisle of the App Store, second only to Doodle games, and more recently, Angry Birds knock-offs. Regardless, developers keep making them, I keep trying them, and rarely do I find one that I'd play over match three staples like Bejeweled 2 [99¢]. Dungeon Raid [$2.99] is a rare exception to this, as it not only has solid matching gameplay with a clever twist, but it also has entirely too many things that I like in video games, making it incredibly hard to put down.

Dungeon Raid begins with you inputting your character name and selecting a difficulty. Don't worry if you can't come up with a good name, the game will suggest tons of random names that fit wonderfully in to any fantasy setting. From there, you're greeted with one of several random introductions to the game explaining how it is that your character has come across this dungeon. These intros are awesome, so I highly recommend actually reading them instead of instinctively mashing buttons to make large blocks of text go away. (I think we're all guilty of this on some level.)

The matching component of the game is quite similar to Azkend [$2.99 / Lite] (Which is another fantastic matching game.) in that instead of swapping pieces around like Bejeweled, you draw chains of similar blocks with your finger. These chains can go any direction, including diagonally, often resulting in massive board clearing matches. In fact, with only five types of blocks, huge chains are quite common.

By now you might be scratching your head wondering why I'm piling shovels full of praise on to a matching game with a matching component that's so simple that it usually doesn't take much skill to clear half the board in one move. Well, it's because of the layer on top of all this that makes Dungeon Raid the game that stole my entire day today. You see, each match you make serves a purpose, and deciding what you're going to match when seems to require quite a bit of strategy, and often some luck, as you never know what's going to replace the blocks you just cleared.

Strategy comes in to play because while Dungeon Raid may initially appear to just be a simple matching game, there's a fairly complex subset of RPG elements that drives everything you do. Enemies are represented by skulls on the game board. "Killing" an enemy involves matching skulls with enough swords to total up more damage than their hit points (which is displayed to the right of each enemy). After every match, every enemy on screen damages you, and special enemies also appear randomly which have increased hit points and other special abilities. One such ability involves their attacks "poisoning" you, at which point you take constant damage until you match healing potions. (Matching healing potions, as you can probably guess, heals you.)

Each skull cleared awards experience. Earn enough experience, and you level up, getting the option of increasing two of your character's attributes. These range from random active special abilities usable with cooldowns, or just flat out increasing your statistics which passively boost how much you're healed, how much damage you do, and things like that. Matching shields repairs your armor, and adds to a upgrade bar. Once your armor upgrade bar is full, you're given the option of improving one of your items, imbuing it with magical properties to increase your health, experience earned, or other effects. Having your armor repaired reduces the damage you take from enemies, so it's important to keep collecting shield blocks regardless.

The last type of block is the coin block. Clearing coins adds cash to your coin purse, and with enough coins saved up you're able to buy brand new items with better statistics than your old items. Also, matching health potion blocks when your health is full does nothing, and matching swords by themselves without skulls also serves no benefit aside from clearing our unneeded sword blocks from the game board. Matching more than three of a particular block gives a bonus, potentially allowing you to collect more of whatever resource it is your matching.

The game is over when your hit points reach zero, and while Dungeon Raid initially starts fairly simple, the more you play the more intense it gets. For instance, when faced with an entire game board full of skulls (often with special enemies as well) and you're forced to figure out whether you've got enough health to handle taking damage for a few turns while you clear blocks to set up a massive skull-slaying chain. Alternatively, you could dispatch the skulls in smaller groups, which potentially would allow you to take less damage and sneak some healing if you're lucky enough for the skull blocks to be replaced with healing potions. Or, assuming they're not on cooldown, you could bust out whatever special abilities your character learned while you leveled up.

Each play through is different too, as the items, abilities, and equipment upgrades you're offered are completely random. One game it might make more sense to play as more of a wizard-type character, focusing on training up active abilities with each level. Alternatively, on another play of the game you might find yourself constantly increasing the raw statistics of your character, focusing on damage, defense, or a balance of the two. Some abilities seem quite powerful, such as one that increases the effectiveness of healing potions. If you have access to this ability early in the game, it can substantially alter how you choose your matches since you can let skulls stay on the game board a little longer as completely healing yourself is as simple as popping that ability off and matching some potions.

The variety and depth of gameplay is just insane for a game, which at the end of the day, is just a simple match three with an entirely too clever RPG layered on top of it. Hell, I don't think I've ever been able to bust out a 1,000 word review on a match three, and that's saying something. Dungeon Raid is an effortless recommendation. It boasts a tutorial that is incredibly approachable, making the game appropriate for even the most casual of puzzle gamers, while offering a top-end that's full of strategy, a bit of luck, and an entire trail of character development decisions. In other words, download this game now.

This game has single-handedly taken over the iPhone/iPad games thread. Like, most pages are just discussion of this game. My wife hates video games. She would rather be doing almost anything than playing a video game. But she saw me playing this, asked how it worked and then bugged me to get it put on her iPhone for the next week.

But is it just for the casual gamer? No. Those little skulls that drop from the top of the screen will kick your ass unless you get some strategies implemented. For instance, I've found that the Enchant Item skill is one of the most useful. Lots of people have recommended the Treasure Room ability in conjunction with several others that essentially give you entire grids of money. I haven't personally tried that strategy, but I'm sure it will be shared.

Basically, this game kicks Puzzle Quest's ass. You never feel cheated. You never feel like the random number generator hates your guts. It's just you, the shields, the potions, the swords, the coins, and the skulls.

And the guy who made it (fireflame) posts on these forums, too. He's been pretty good about taking suggestions and giving advice. Thanks for the awesome game, fireflame!

Hopefully people can talk about other games in the iOS game thread now. Or maybe it'll drop off the first three pages. I know which one I think is most likely.

It's kind of funny how the puzzle-RPG hybrid genre has developed over time; for a while Puzzle Quest was the king, but between this stunningly great adaptation of roguelike characteristics, and how Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes takes more of a Panel de Pon approach, you can get a fantastic amount of variety.

Loooooooove Dungeon Raid so much. I'm in the middle of my best run yet right now, the first time I've been able to really lean into Treasure Chamber combined with two of the collect-all skills and Big Game Hunter. The first three let me keep above the curve on gold, and BGH lets me set up big sword combos, bait a special monster in and then take him down quickly, milking for great XP and gold.

I just played a raider game last night. I'm still not sure I love it more than thief with board clearance and treasure chamber, but it was pretty sweet.

The core of my raider strategy was gold on killing skulls + coins -> skulls + big game hunter, basically just trying to max xp and see how that worked. It turns out that all of those skills end up with pretty quick cooldowns; fully upgraded with a Quick accessory I could pull the combo off every 4 or 5 turns. As such, I'd get +1 armor for killing over 15 skulls if I had even reasonable luck with skulls + coins, plus usually a level up, plus a purchase half the time from the coins. Not too shabby. I got a 20 or 30k score pretty easily on normal.

The problem is that XP isn't quite as versatile as upgrades or coins in the long run, I think. XP is amazing early on for getting you the skills you want faster. Later on, though, XP only gets you health, base damage, and extra health/shields from collecting. (assuming you max bonus chance, which you will after enough time in any game) Coins gets you defense and weapon damage, with the occasional upgrade to whatever enchantments you've been picking up. (I get regen every once in a while, or spikes, or upgrades to penetration/durability, etc) Upgrades is similar to coins, with lots of special item abilities and occasionally defense/weapon damage improvements.

So if you're going for a heavy regen/spikes build, concentrating on shields is the way to go, if you're going for a basic armor/damage build, go coins (good for special skulls), and if you want to deal with lots of normal skulls / tank damage, go heavy XP. Obviously that's not to say that you can't do both (coins from skulls and coins -> skulls, or collect potions as xp plus treasure chamber), but it's my current rule of thumb.

Anyone having luck with the mage? I'm really not figuring out how to make the mage work. The free mana potion every once in a while is fine and dandy, and I can see every turn slashes being awesome, but I haven't figured out what to pair that with. More importantly, rune seems terrible. The idea behind it is awesome - draw a circle, collect everything in the circle! Very intuitive, very fun when you pull it off. The problem I find is that you never have a circle to collect, and when I do it's because 3/4 of my screen is swords/skulls anyways, so the interior of the circle could be matched anyways. Even an earthquake + rune build didn't seem to give me much help.

When you guys do build treasure chest builds, what's your preference for collect spells? (I'm looking at you, jamwarrior) If you have TC, you get 3 other spells. Collect coins is almost a no-brainer, and for the last 2 spots I want to pick between collect shields, pots -> xp, and double coins. Normally I go TC, collect coins, collect shields, double coins, but I love the feeling of clearing all three collectibles in the same turn.

Lastly, does anyone know if the double shields spell just gets you double armor repair, or if it also gets you double upgrade points from the shields you collect?

NOTE / message to fireflame: I'm not sure if it's a bug or working as intended, but neither the "gold on killing skulls" nor the halfling's "15 skulls in a round = +1 armor" skills work in cooperation with explosive armor. This seems like some awesome synergy, but I suppose it could be a touch overpowered. I found out in a coins -> skulls, coins from skulls, collect shields, explosive armor game.

I highly disagree that the game isn't very random, but it's leagues better than Puzzle Quest. Like, so much better.

That doesn't mean a boss skull won't ruin your shit every so often.

Well, what I meant with that statement is that in PQ, the computer will make seemingly innocuous matches and then a million 4-in-a-row matches rain down from the heavens and completely wreck the entirety of your shit. The nature of a match 3 means there will be some randomness. It's just that, in my opinion, Dungeon Raid does the best job of giving you tools to mitigate the random asskickings.

And when you die in this, it isn't nearly as infuriating as it is in Puzzle Quest.

I highly disagree that the game isn't very random, but it's leagues better than Puzzle Quest. Like, so much better.

That doesn't mean a boss skull won't ruin your shit every so often.

Well, what I meant with that statement is that in PQ, the computer will make seemingly innocuous matches and then a million 4-in-a-row matches rain down from the heavens and completely wreck the entirety of your shit. The nature of a match 3 means there will be some randomness. It's just that, in my opinion, Dungeon Raid does the best job of giving you tools to mitigate the random asskickings.

And when you die in this, it isn't nearly as infuriating as it is in Puzzle Quest.

I think the main difference is that new things raining down don't attack until the following turn, so you can stare at it for a second and come to realize you better do something or *next* turn you will die.

So I've been pretty much just playing rogue. With the right set up, I can nab about three full screens of coins, which usually gets me 2-3 new items. With the regen+ perk I've been getting to level 40-50 pretty regularly.

I did find PQ really frustrating at times. Still haven't played PQ2 yet.

I generally dislike the "you can run out of possible matches" mechanic that exists in 99.99999% of Match 3 games, which more or less precludes me from generating any real interest in the genre (thank God) but I like how Dungeon Raid still has difficulty and tension but manages to completely eschew that bullshit no-matches-left mechanic.

It's based on the rogue-like approach, so since every character will die eventually the only thing I'd be worried about losing if my data wiped would be my high score list, which i don't really care about but some people might.

It does have unlocked content the more you play the game so I guess that would also go if data was erased, but I... like unlocking things...

Is it more pick up and play here and there or would you seriously be upset if your file got deleted?

The game was a fuckload of fun before they added any unlockable stuff. But I think I would be upset if I unlocked everything and then my data got wiped somehow. So I have to answer "yes" to both parts of your "or" question.

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anoffdayTo be changed whenever Anoffday gets around to it.Registered Userregular

Well, and let's be honest. It's not like it's that difficult to unlock everything anyways. Just grab big game hunter and a few clear skills and you'll blow through the first batch of upgrades really easily.

This is the epitome of "pick up and play," even outside of the fact that iPhones sort of give free save-state suspension with the fast app switching. One of the main reasons I like it so much over the obvious comparison to Puzzle Quest is how fast everything is: I often blaze through a turn in three or four seconds, and once you get a rhythm of your skill recharges, it's crazy how fast you can play.

I had a great Raider run going on Hard Mode yesterday. Had a Masochism/Enchant/Double Shields/Repair setup going. The Enchant plus repairs really helped in making up for the flaw of Masochism, which is that you end up with massive base damage and almost no weapon damage. Ended up with a score of almost 30k, which is the best I've gotten on Hard.

My friend however is having no luck with Masochism. It seems like every other game, he dies to a Meat Shield appearing as soon as he hits the skill, which is an automatic death with no hope of recovery. I guess that's a fair risk for using Masochism, which otherwise might be the best skill in the game.

I feel like the game just fucks me every time. Despite playing a lot, I will almost always die at turn 2XX on average. There have been maybe two games where I break turn 300. The game just seems to adapt to whatever I do in order to fuck me. Maybe that's the point, and you just need a lucky break with spell availability to get farther.

I try going heavily defensive, and the skulls either quickly get ridiculous attack or just take forever to kill. Going for high attack seems to give them HIGHER defense or just high enough attack to kill me. A more balanced approach does me no better.

I'm seeing what spells are good, but it's rarely making a difference. Teleport? Oh, here's another boss three turns after it. It really feels like there's nothing I can do to get better at the game other than pray I don't get fucked on the later drops.

Are you playing on normal? If so I'm guessing you're probably playing too conservatively. Generally try taking as many tiles as possible on every turn, even if it means using 20 swords when there's just one enemy on the board. You want to cycle more tiles each turn so you get more upgrades each turn so you can stay ahead of the monster levelling curve.

I'll try that. I don't play conservatively on purpose (I'll take a big pile of coin or shields), but I avoided needlessly wasting tiles (giant gobs of potions when at full HP, swords, etc.) to avoid getting reamed by skulls.

I'll try that. I don't play conservatively on purpose (I'll take a big pile of coin or shields), but I avoided needlessly wasting tiles (giant gobs of potions when at full HP, swords, etc.) to avoid getting reamed by skulls.

Definitely change that strategy. Unless you're at the end-game where you have to make very specific moves to survive from turn to turn, you don't want to keep potions laying around. By leaving a bunch of potions on the board, you're limiting the amount of tiles you can receive that will let you level up more. Better to clear a whole board of potions even if you're at full HP so that the board can refill with things to give you XP, coins, and shields.

Also be sure not to be obsessed with killing skulls ASAP, especially in the early game. Treat them like any other tile and try to wait until you can clear a ton of skulls & swords at once. If they start eating away at your health, no problem. Now you'll feel less wasteful when you take big potion chains as mentioned above.

I love the game, but can someone clarify for me the boss skull that is called Armored. The guy can only be killed, at least that I've noticed, when I trace through him to the tile directly above him...otherwise I do no damage to him. I ask because it doesn't seem like this is what his description is saying, cause it mentions something about any 3 tiles above him or something.

I'm also unhappy with some skills not working the way I'd hoped they would. For instance, Greed says that it'll kill any enemy that's next to a coin...but doesn't do anything to the bosses. The exploding potion skill doesn't do damage to bosses either. I also grabbed the skill that doubles the amount of potions grabbed, and then used that with the XP potion skill thinking that could be interesting but it didn't work out the way I'd thought it might.

Also, there isn't any way to get back to the title page once I've started a new game and I'm selecting my character. I went in just now to see what some of the skills were called and wanted to go back so I could check my scores, but had to start the game and end it so I could get back to the main menu.

None of these are really complaints, as I'm still playing the game far more than anything else I should be doing, but it does tend to really narrow down the way I play the game. I'd say 2/3 of the skills that are available I won't take.

I love the game, but can someone clarify for me the boss skull that is called Armored. The guy can only be killed, at least that I've noticed, when I trace through him to the tile directly above him...otherwise I do no damage to him. I ask because it doesn't seem like this is what his description is saying, cause it mentions something about any 3 tiles above him or something.

Tracing to any 3 above him definitely works for me. Doesn't matter if it's at the beginning or end of a chain, either, as long as I go up or diagonally up from him to a sword or skull.

I'm also unhappy with some skills not working the way I'd hoped they would. For instance, Greed says that it'll kill any enemy that's next to a coin...but doesn't do anything to the bosses. The exploding potion skill doesn't do damage to bosses either. I also grabbed the skill that doubles the amount of potions grabbed, and then used that with the XP potion skill thinking that could be interesting but it didn't work out the way I'd thought it might.

Yeah, you learn these things through experimentation. To be fair, stuff like Greed/Exploding potions/the Hack & Slash combo would be kinda broken if they could kill special monsters. I was also very disappointed that Double Potion didn't work with either Skill Elixer or mana potions.

Also, there isn't any way to get back to the title page once I've started a new game and I'm selecting my character. I went in just now to see what some of the skills were called and wanted to go back so I could check my scores, but had to start the game and end it so I could get back to the main menu.

You could force the app to shut down and open it again. I agree though that there should be some kind of "Back" button.